English

Cooling timescale of dust tori in dying active galactic nuclei

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2017-07-26 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

We estimate the dust torus cooling timescale once the active galactic nucleus (AGN) is quenched. In a clumpy torus system, once the incoming photons are suppressed, the cooling timescale of one clump from Tdust=1000T_{\rm dust}=1000 K to several 1010 K is less than 1010 years, indicating that the dust torus cooling time is mainly governed by the light crossing time of the torus from the central engine. After considering the light crossing time of the torus, the AGN torus emission at 12 μ12~\mum becomes over two orders of magnitude fainter within 100100 years after the quenching. We also propose that those "dying" AGN could be found using the AGN indicators with different physical scale RR such as 12 μ12~\mum band luminosity tracing AGN torus (R10R \sim 10 pc) and the optical [OIII]λ5007\lambda5007 emission line narrow line regions (R=1024R=10^{2-4} pc).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.03071,
  title  = {Cooling timescale of dust tori in dying active galactic nuclei},
  author = {Kohei Ichikawa and Ryo Tazaki},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.03071},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

8 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ